The Cosmos Adventure - News
Joe Dorr Report from the West Coast of Africa
Cosmos
18o 01’ South – 002o 02’ West
January 28, 2003
We watched the sun go down last night as we, aboard Cosmos, crossed from the Eastern to the Western Hemisphere. This is the first time Cosmos has been in the Western Hemisphere since November 4th, 2002. Now we are 40 hours from St. Helena Island, expecting to be there on Thursday. But before I go over our latest passage, I’ll write a little about Namibia and the town of Luderitz that we visited.
Namibia (January 18 to 21)
Luderitz is a Bavarian village on the desolate desert coast, north on the West Coast of South Africa. Well, at least the architecture is Bavarian. I was first told that we just had to visit Namibia from a crafts-vendor on the island of Moorea, 40 miles from Tahiti. She was a resident of Moorea when we spoke, but had been born in Germany and was fascinated by the sights of Namibia, particularly, Luderitz, when she visit there. Namibia is a large desert country and was a German Colony up until the end of WWI, when it was made part of South Africa. The country’s largest product is diamonds. Namibia became an independent country in 1990.
Luderitz was a bit surreal, with its German, stone churches (two of them dominate the skyline) official buildings and many of the older homes of stucco construction and style that you would see across South Germany. There is not a tree in the town, and a couple of days a week, the sand is carried into the town from the surrounding desert.
We made a visit to the Kolmanskop Diamond Mine ghost town. The buildings were all German in appearance. We went into the abandoned and sand filled “Engineer’s House.” The sand filled the first floor half way up the doorways. We had to stoop low to change rooms. The interior construction (right down to the window and door trim) was amazingly similar to the German-built farmhouse we owned in Middletown, Maryland. The exterior wall and main interior walls were constructed of brick, three layers thick, just like our house in Middletown.
We made a long trip out into the desert to see the famous, “world’s largest dunes” and were not disappointed. The dunes were spectacular, but the entire desert was what made the trip worth while. We went to Klien Aus Vista, a cattle farm, B&B and tour center, for a guided tour. There we met Peter who runs the tour operation and William, his father, who gave us our tour.
I felt privileged to have William as our guide. It was evident that he loved his desert farm. He gave us information from first-hand experience, since the eight-hour driving tour never left his farm. He was born and raised in Namibia, he bought his farm 20 years ago, and is now retired, but helps his sons, when needed. He owns 34,000 acres and farms about 50,000 acres (renting some parkland from the government). On the farm, his produce is 500 head of cattle. In Maryland, I believe they say it takes about 2 acres per head of cattle. In Namibia, it takes 100 acres. They put in no hay of feed. The steers eat the desert grasses. When we went out to where the cattle graze it was easy to see why they require 100 acres per steer. William told us they average 20 to 50 milimeters of rain per year.
The desert was vast and desolate. The desolation became particularly noticeable, when William bottomed out the Land Cruiser going over a sand drift. He expressed concern because we were miles from any assistance, he had no shovel, and no form of communications to call help. The Cosmos Crew climbed under the vehicle and moved enough sand to get the vehicle back on its wheels and off we went.
I can’t begin to describe the beauty of the desert. I only hope some of our pictures convey the stark, vastness of this monochromatic visual feast.
When George and I went on a safari in the Hluhluwe Nature Reserve, we both felt like we were seeing animals in an altered, controlled setting. We saw many other people. To spot animals, all you had to do is stop the car where others were stopped and stare in the same direction they were looking and you found the rhinos, or giraffes. In the Namib Desert, we felt like we were truly seeing wild animals, running free, seldom observed by humans. Of course we did not see the variety of animals in the desert, but we saw Gemsbok, buzzards, lizards, birds, eagles, and hawks. But the landscape was the real attraction; so vast and beautiful.
The ride back to Luderitz was another adventure. About half-way, the wind started blowing hard and before long, we were in the middle of a sand storm. Because of the blowing sand, we could hardly see the small abandoned Kolmanskop as we passed right next to it. Fifteen miles out of Luderitz, we had to slow down for sand drifts that had settled on the road. Traveling at about 40 kph, we could hardly see the road ahead and suddenly we hit a sand drift that had crossed the road. The suspension came up and pounded against the bottom of the car and sent the car up into the air. Poor Yoost had been asleep in the back of the car until his head hit the ceiling. I thought certainly the tires or suspension must have broken, but without stopping, it became evident that our small rental vehicle was made of tough stuff.
That same afternoon, in the sandstorm, we made the best use of our rental car by getting ten cans of diesel, oil and groceries to the dock before we had to turn in the car. Then we used our trusty dinghy to haul everything back to Cosmos. We sailed out of Luderitz the next morning.
Passage to St. Helena (January 21 to 30)
The passage to St. Helena is turning out to be a lot of fun. The first two days Cosmos shot out of Luderitz and made almost 200 miles the first day, and 201 the second day. Finally my stomach and the wind settled down and I considered raising the spinnaker. George writes about many of our challenges of the spinnaker in his journal. As Daniel said when we were all trying to figure out what had happened on one particularly exciting dowsing of the massive sail, “after the first couple of planned steps and a couple of missteps, everything became ad lib.
So far flying the spinnaker has cost us two halyards and one sheet. We also got one small hole in the sail pulling it out from under the front of the moving boat in thirty knot winds. I consider us lucky to still have a functional spinnaker. All we need now is a new primary and spare halyard. Until then we won’t be flying our biggest shute. If we can’t get the right rope in St. Helena, I have some aboard that will work, but we still want the protection from the seas of St. Helena’ harbor before we go aloft for the work.
Still heading to St. Helena.
Joe Dorr
Captain of the Cosmos
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